California Road Trip

Having spent most of the summer just hanging out, we decided to take a 2 week trip to California, using a business engagement as the premise. This is often how our holidays happen. My Lord Dr King rarely takes vacations. it’s the adult ADHD I suppose.

This time it was mostly vacation with a sprinkling of meetings…all wrapped up in a road trip because road trips are awesome!

We flew to Los Angeles and My Lord Dr King participated in a conferral of two well deserving individuals to receive honourary doctorates for the same University which he received his. He’s the Dean of Technology there now… seriously don’t even ask.

With a stop in the middle and a quick look around Hollywood boulevard, rodeo drive and an unsuccessful try at the Hollywood sign, the next day we headed south to La Jolla (San Diego) to meet with a couple of other business partners and mixed business and pleasure again. It’s alway fun when you end your night drinking wine and smoking cigars on the hotel room deck while all the children play. Until some curmudgeony hotel guest comes up to complain he cant’s sleep for the noise. Spoiled sport.

Anyway, the following morning we were sure to leave by noon and with one more stop along the way, we headed back north to LA and as close to San Francisco as we could get in one day. Naturally we managed to hit LA for peak hour traffic. Shit planning but the kids got to experience it I suppose. I could never live in LA with all that traffic.

Once we finally got on the open road and the familiar signs started to appear, like Ventura Highway and Santa Barbara etc we enjoyed car games and all the fun road trip things you do. The kids love road trips with Miss Gremlin leading the charge of eye-spy, the numberplate and the song game, ad nauseum for the rest of the car. The scenery along Highway 1 and 101 heading up the Pacific Coast was breathtaking! We will do it again.

We stopped for dinner in San Louis Obispo and fell in love with the quaint little town. Northern California was showing some appeal. After dinner we got back on the road to chew down as many miles as we could, so our drive into Napa the next day wasn’t too long. We wound through some hills as we climbed higher and finding ourselves super low on fuel at midnight, we held our breath as we rolled into a sleepy hollow with a 24hr fuel pump. By then we were all done with driving and we drove another few miles and got the last two rooms in a hotel in Carmel.  Carmel is the little place where Clint Eastwood was once Mayor.

Washing off the road and sleeping soundly, the morning found us closer to Monterey Bay than we expected and a quick breakfast on the pier and we were off again to San Francisco and Napa valley where we would stay for a few days.